Danceworks
Performance Company is a Milwaukee laboratory and showcase for inter-arts
performance. “Intersect,” running Nov. 15-24 at the Danceworks Studio Theatre
(1661 N. Water St.), will offer five such world premieres.

Product of Distance is the work of choreographers
Christina Briggs Winslow and Edward Winslow, composer Tim Russell, video artist
Katelyn Price and DPC’s resident dancers. This is Briggs Winslow’s third year
as visiting professor at UW-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts dance program.
Her husband is a freelance dancer, choreographer, designer and puppet maker.
They have virtually moved to Milwaukee.

This
performance grew from a UWM symposium the couple conducted with Russell and
others last spring about multi-disciplinary performance. Russell, the premier
composer for modern dance in Milwaukee, speaks of a search for “musical
empathy” with dancers. His newest composition is rhythm driven and employs
sounds such as the voices of children playing, “to create a human element using
synthesized sound,” he said.

Winslow
built a giant, floorless pup tent that hangs from the ceiling to provide a
metaphoric personal space for dancers and a screen for Price’s subliminal flash
images. The choreography is abstracted from personal material and reflects the
couple’s style, Winslow said.

The
title Um, ok... Now Let’s Move On
repeats a phrase that flutist Emma Koi used as she played a fortune telling game
with cellist Alicia Storin and dancer Christal Wagner, her co-founders in
Cadence Collective. They recorded the game on a whim last spring. Koi and
Storin have turned the cadences and rhythms of their voices into music for
flute and cello to which Wagner choreographed a duet for herself and DPC’s
Melissa Anderson. Koi calls the music “a study on thought.” For Wagner, the
dancing adds comic irony to a work built on wondering “What will become of me?”

“Intersect”also includes premieres by
choreographers Gina Laurenzi and Laura Murphy with, respectively,
composer/engineer Matt Martell and composer/vocalist Amanda Schoofs, the latter
teamed with musicologists Steve Schlei, Trevor Saint and David Collins; and Laws and Logic by DPC’s Artistic Director
Dani Kuepper with the company, on rules and breaking them.